Consumers may not initially equate live music, gaming and the metaverse with an insurance brand—but with its recent launch on Roblox, State Farm is looking to change all that.

“We’re in a category that not many folks wake up thinking about every day,” said Alyson Griffin, Vice President of Marketing at State Farm. “It felt like the right next steps… showing up where our potential and future customers will be in new, interesting ways—but that are authentic to how they think about us in the real world.”

That’s the idea behind its new metaverse activation iHeartLand, a music-themed interactive experience on Roblox created in partnership with iHeartMedia and Intel, featuring live, virtual concerts, gamified music composition, branded worlds from State Farm and Intel, and much more. We spoke with Griffin and iHeartMedia CMO Gayle Troberman about the value the experience is creating for the companies involved, the advantages of cross-brand promotion, the importance of collecting data and insights through testing and advice for brands who are looking to build a presence in the metaverse.

Chief Marketer: There’s a lot of talk about the metaverse at the moment, but not every brand is participating quite yet. Why is that important for your brands to get involved?

Gayle Troberman, CMO of iHeartMedia: At iHeart, we believe in democratizing access between fans and artists and brands and podcasters at scale. We’re always about testing and learning in new spaces, to go wherever the fans are, and to try to create those once-in-a-lifetime experiences and moments. As we saw how big the numbers were, particularly the metaverse gaming platforms that already have high usage and hundreds of millions of consumers engaging on a regular basis, we thought what a perfect place to create new experiences that bring music and gaming together, which is a new space for us. We believe in going everywhere fans are and figuring out what the right experiences are between the fans, the brand and the artists. And that’s exactly what we’re in the middle of with our friends at State Farm.

Alyson Griffin, Vice President of Marketing at State Farm: For State Farm, I’ll just lay it out there: We’re in a category that not many folks wake up thinking about every day. And I’m saying it with a huge smile on my face. Not only that, but we are not a global brand. We operate only in the United States. And just like for every business around the globe, the buying power of the under 40 crowd is immensely important to all brands globally. So we are trying to think of interesting, exciting, unexpected ways to show up to generate future demand. When Gayle started talking to us about this opportunity with iHeartLand in the metaverse, I jumped in really fast because we can replicate what we do naturally in the real world. We show up with stadium sponsorships, for example, naming rights and gaming. We’ve been in gaming for over a decade and we are a big sponsor of audio, with iHeart as an example. It felt like the right next steps… showing up where our potential and future customers will be in new interesting ways—but that are authentic to how they think about us in the real world.

CM: Using your mascot, Jake from State Farm, as a way to engage with players seemed like a smart choice.

AG: We were fortunate to have a little bit of learning here. Jake was the first non-playable-character in NBA2K, maybe a year and a half ago now. We did a lot of learning and testing. Will people approach him? If they do, how long will they interact with him? If they interact with him, will they spend their money on a skin, which is khakis and a red shirt? All that kind of stuff. So when we were talking to Gayle and the iHeart team about the metaverse, it was a no-brainer that we would want to put Jake in it.

And then the final act that we have is literally the words “like a good neighbor, State Farm is there,” but also the notion of what it means to be a good neighbor. Jake’s able to represent that good neighbor spirit in the game.

CM: There are some synergies between your brands. Can you talk about the value of cross-brand promotion here?

AG: For State Farm, we were already good partners with iHeart. And what I mean by that is a partner who understands our culture, understands what matters to us, has worked with us and activated for a long period of time and knew what our brand safety guidelines were. That really matters to State Farm. So, right out of the gate, there was a trust with iHeart in particular. We were both jumping in, and I think I can say for both of us, this was a leap—no small amount of money here. So the synergy there, at least to start, was: At least we are doing this with someone who understands how important our brand safety and attributes are.

The other reason that iHeart was a really great choice for us was the scale. They’re reaching nine out of every 10 Americans, and the media mass network of broadcast and podcast, where we are already enjoying a lot of benefit, is something that was important to us. Again, because we are not a global brand, and to surround people in the United States with our message is difficult [when you] just have the power of one country. This reach that iHeart has was really critical to agreeing to go into it.

GT: You see a lot of brands jumping into the metaverse or opening their own parks or land, but it’s a real commitment to program new content and new experiences on an every day, every week, every month basis. The equation is great for iHeart and for the brands and for the artists who perform in the metaverse at State Farm Park and iHeartLand because we have the promotional power to go on iHeart’s broadcast radio stations, across iHeart’s podcast network and our streaming platform. And we can rally users and tell consumers every day about what’s happening in Roblox, in Fortnite, and we can pull consumers in on a regular basis. And there’s consumers who may not even go to iHeartLand in Roblox, but will know that those things are happening and they’ll hear about State Farm Park and then they’ll understand the brand is about innovation and engaging consumers in new and fun ways where music and gaming collide.

CM: Music and sound branding are key features of the activation. Do you see audio playing a pivotal role in the development of metaverse activations moving forward?

AG: Yes, audio will be part of the metaverse. And music. My guess is that it’ll be fully immersive. One of the interesting things is that we have stadium rights in the real world. And if Charlie Puth was playing a stadium, maybe he would do multiple days or he would have to go on a world tour to hit the number of people who attended the State Farm Park iHeartLand concert that he just did in one go. That notion of democratizing access to these famous artists is really appealing to us. And I think that the metaverse provides that opportunity. I don’t have to get on a plane. I don’t have to pay for this huge ticket. I don’t have to wait until the summer—whatever it is. I can just attend in the metaverse.

GT: If you’re Charlie Puth or Lauv, which are the two concerts we’ve done to date, as an artist it’s an amazing experience, too. Charlie got to perform once, and that concert was probably the equivalent of doing 50 to a hundred sold out shows in Madison Square Garden. So all of a sudden he’s got so many of his fans, as Alyson said, who can access a new experience. Now, how concerts evolve and what exactly is the interaction and the interplay between the music and the gaming experience, that’s one of the big new questions that we’re all just learning about. But the music community is equally interested in figuring out the right interaction between a performance and their music and the games and the experience. It’s a whole new way to see a concert and not just be sitting in a seat.

AG: This is just pondering the future of the metaverse, but it occurs to me that it could potentially be the present-day radio or television, where it’s a gathering place for the family as well, depending on what is happening in the metaverse. Most people think it’s the kids and they’re putting on a headset and stealing themselves away. And maybe some of that is true, but with these kinds of experiences evolving, I think families can participate together and talk and discuss—the way the radio and the television changed family dynamics when they were each introduced.

Stay tuned for part 2 of our conversation with iHeartMedia and State Farm, to come later this week on Chiefmarketer.com.

The post iHeartMedia CMO and State Farm VP Discuss New Metaverse Activation on Roblox appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Marketers today are under pressure to tap every possible channel to enhance ROI—and that includes direct mail. Following are additional elements of a mailing campaign to consider that go beyond the typical attributes of the offer, the creative and the database, according to a piece in Multichannel Merchant.

Delivery Day

Target your delivery within a three-day window in order to generate a higher response rate.

Cadence Execution

Most marketers mail the same person multiple offers in what’s termed a “cadence.” Monitor its execution to ensure recipients are receiving the offers in the order that’s intended.

Postage Optimization

Optimize postage costs—which in certain cases means a cost increase—so that consumers receive mail pieces at a time that generates the highest response rates.

In-Home Dates

Rather than focusing on a specific date that mailings begin, embrace an “in-home” strategy, which targets consumers within an optimal three-day window.

For more ways to improve your direct mail campaign strategy, read on in Multichannel Merchant.

The post Eight Ways to Enhance Your Direct Mail Campaign appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Enter: HBO’s premium unboxing experience for its new fantasy- and sci-fi-themed show “The Nevers,” which by all accounts has bucked the trend. The intricately-designed custom kit, named “Penance’s Curiosities + Cocktail Compendium” in reference to the central character’s sense of curiosity and invention, was targeted at the influencers and superfans most likely to curate social posts while interacting with the kit’s contents—from a Victorian-inspired china set with tea accoutrements to an electro-magnetic “Hoverbulb” to a puzzle designed to challenge the most detail-oriented fans. (For a closer look, check out our photo tour of the compendium’s touchpoints.)

To explore the key strategies HBO employed to create an escape room-inspired, at-home experience that more than delivered on the wow factor, read on in Event Marketer.

The post HBO Max Delivers Premium Unboxing Experience to Influencers and Superfans for ‘The Nevers’ appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Godiva is putting $5 million behind the campaign, which coincides with its 95th anniversary. In the assets, the brand’s signature gold hue is offset by bright blues, pinks and magentas that will help it compete for attention on crowded supermarket shelves. Likewise, the voiceover for the 30-second spots references both “magnificent artistry” and “at a chocolate aisle near you.”

“We want them putting Godiva on their shopping list,” says Godiva CMO John Galloway. “To understand that you can buy us, you need to know we’re on the chocolate aisle.”

Now that Godiva is readily available at Costco and Target, Kroger and CVS, could the brand lose its premium cachet? Galloway doesn’t think so. “Some believe in the notion that scarcity drives premium. That’s not a notion I believe in.”

Galloway cites approachability, desirability and accessibility as the cornerstones of the campaign’s message. “One thing we got dinged on in the past was that we weren’t accessible to people,” he explains. “Now we’re saying, Hey, we’re a brand where you might not have thought you could walk into our boutiques, but we want to hang out with you, and you want to hang out with us.”

In fact, Godiva announced in January 2021 the closure of its 128 North American boutiques and cafés, whose pristine, precisely curated interiors had nurtured the brand’s aura of exclusivity. COVID-19 restrictions played a role in that decision, but even before the pandemic, “we as an organization had already started to pivot to refocus on CPG and ecommerce,” Galloway says. “The CPG business is where we continue to double down.”

While overall CPG chocolate sales since the beginning of 2021 are up 7 percent year-over-year, with premium CPG chocolate up 17 percent, Godiva has enjoyed a 22 percent lift in CPG sales. What’s more, Godiva’s ecommerce sales were up 77 percent last year, and year-to-date sales have increased another 22 percent.

The pandemic contributed to some of that increase, of course, and not just because grocery stores, drugstores and ecommerce channels were for many the sole sources for chocolates and other goods. “I think during challenging times, people want to go get a little bright spot in their day, a little bit of premium indulgence, and that’s why they turned to Godiva,” Galloway says. The campaign plays into that, with spots referencing “celebrations, every day or night” alongside imagery of Godiva candies certain to instill a craving for chocolate in viewers.

“At the real center of this is to open people’s eyes to a more wonderful world, one that chocolate is a part of,” Galloway says. The campaign will deliver that message via ads on BuzzFeed, Hulu, YouTube and Amazon, among other media properties and publishers, supported by social media. There will also be “a nice holiday promotion,” Galloway says. And in New York City in June, the team will be dish out samples from a branded pink truck to celebrate its 95th anniversary and “bring a little bit of happiness as New York comes back to life.”

The post Godiva CMO: Marketing Campaign Positions Brand as Both Accessible and Premium appeared first on Chief Marketer.

“The biggest mistake companies make is focusing on what channel works,” Powers says. Rather, “they should focus on what mix of channels works. We’re an online/offline integrated world now.”

With postage rates increasing annually—and with rumors that another USPS rate hike could come this summer—it might be tempting to give up on direct mail. Yet there’s evidence that because it isn’t digital, direct mail makes a significant impact—especially on millennial consumers. According to the USPS, two-thirds of millennials use marketing mail “as a prompt to go online,” compared with 54 percent of Gen Xers and 42 percent of baby boomers. And while 27 percent of baby boomers and 28 percent of Gen Xers regularly buy products featured in direct mail, 40 percent of millennials do.

“Younger people like the feel, the touch, the physical engagement of mail,” Powers says, “and they’re not used to it as much.” In a morass of emails, digital ads and social media, a mail piece is a novelty that can really stand out—particularly if it’s personalized.

Of course, personalization goes beyond addressing the recipient by name. It entails ensuring that the mail piece’s imagery, messaging and offer speak to the recipient. For a seller of pet insurance, that could mean featuring puppies rather than kittens on postcards to dog owners; for a traffic driver to a store or a showroom, it could mean including a customized map. Mail pieces to prospects might emphasize a brand’s reputation and solid reviews; the version sent to customers could feature the same imagery and display copy but steer recipients to specific product webpages instead.

Data and data analytics are key to achieving this degree of personalization—and therefore key to seeing ROI on direct mail. Data analytics can also help you weed out those who are unlikely to respond to your direct mail efforts. “You want to make sure you are identifying the best audience for your product and service,” Powers says. “Instead of mailing a million people, you might want to mail 500,000, as long as those are the right people.”

Digital marketers are no doubt aware of how granular data analytics can get. They might not know, however, that direct mail is now equally sophisticated. “There’s an opportunity for high variability in our mail,” Powers says. Multiple creative treatments and offers can be tested within one campaign. “Testing is so important to make sure you’re constantly updating your data and getting the most relevant info on who you’re talking to.”

The increased sophistication of data analytics and mail capabilities allows marketers to tweak campaigns in response to results almost immediately. If a January test of three versions of a postcard shows that version C was a big miss with recipients, a marketer can remove that option from the next mailing while still meeting the mail date.

It also encourages marketers to take advantage of the Postal Service’s Mailing Promotions Calendar, something Powers is a proponent of. The USPS offers discounts throughout the year to organizations that implement certain technologies into their mail pieces. For instance, companies can register through the end of August to use AR, VR, video and other emerging technologies in their letters and flats in exchange for a 2 percent postage discount.

Other promotions through the end of 2021 reward use of QR codes and the USPS’s Informed Delivery service. The discounts help mitigate the risks inherent in testing. This testing, in turn, might reveal that a format with a higher cost per piece generates appreciably stronger response, enough not only to justify the expense going forward but also to lift ROI.

To make the most of the USPS promotions discounts, companies need to plan ahead. Then again, Powers says, they should be doing so regardless: “The biggest message we try to express is the importance of treating your marketing budget as an ROI strategy rather than as individual campaigns.”

The post Achieving Direct Mail ROI Through an Integrated Marketing Approach appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Our monthly analysis of the world’s top brands and the marketing moves that are setting them apart.

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SmileDirectClub, a teledentistry company that helps consumers straighten their teeth through 3D impressions and customized aligners, is based on an important insight: 60 percent of counties in the United States don’t have an orthodontist’s office. Teeth straightening can also be too expensive for the average consumer. So, the company decided to make it easier by bringing the service to them. It’s has been in business since 2014. And about 350 “SmileShops” later, the disruptor brand is poised for additional global expansion.

A quick note before we jump into the brand’s marketing story: Many companies are doing their part to assist the medical community that is currently battling the COVID-19 pandemic. SmileDirectClub is one of them. It’s in the process of evaluating multiple products to create in the marketplace, from face shields to certified masks to swabs for testing. “We’ve dedicated a substantial portion of our 3D-printing facility to be able to help produce them as fast as we can,” says SmileDirectClub CMO John Sheldon. “It’s really critical for us to contribute.”

Customer Experience and Acquisition

Given that it’s a DTC brand, a critical focus for SmileDirectClub is enhancing the customer experience. Recently it has worked to create a more direct connection with the orthodontist that each “club member” is assigned, decrease shipping times for its kits and expand insurance coverage, to name a few upgrades. “We want to bring our customers closer to each other, in community, and have them feel closer to our support and dental teams as well,” Sheldon says. “That means all the ways that we can help them through their treatment, whether it’s tactical—like a lost aligner—or more emotional, as in when they’re having a tough time or they’ve had their first compliment about their smile—maybe ever—and want to share that.”

The brand focuses on its customers’ transformations. So, as it continues to grow and expand, those stories of transformation have moved to center stage from a marketing perspective. “When you’re a transformational brand, it’s your customer stories that really tell what your brand is all about. So, we regularly touch base with our customers, whether it’s just a simple check-in to do NPS scores, and so on. And when they go through their smile journey, they have multiple check-ins with their dental team along the way,” he says. The stories help understand the “why” of what the company does. “It’s just a part of the mix, but it’s important for us to help build credibility and get to the emotional side of these outcomes, which are quite powerful,” says Sheldon.

It’s resulted in a shift in the brand’s customer acquisition strategy, Sheldon says. “Now that we’re in our fourth year of substantive marketing, we’re starting to shift our customer acquisition messaging. We’re letting our customers start to tell those stories. It’s enabling people who’ve been through this transformation to tell that story, and so we’re using that to open up the top of the funnel and hit new audiences today.” For instance, the brand did an integration with a club member on the TV show “The Biggest Loser” that included a number of video segments. She opens the spot with the declaration that SmileDirectClub changed her life—which sounds more authentic than if the brand itself said it. The company works with other influencers as well, including Sofia Vergara and Brandi Cyrus. In some cases influencers take their followers through the entire journey, which is ideal.

 

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Today is World Smile Day! I’m just finishing my own journey to a straighter smile with @smiledirectclub, and I’m excited to announce that they will be donating 15 smiles during the month of October through their “Gift of Grin” contest! If you’ve been wanting a more confident smile, now is the time!! All you have to do is submit a picture and a 250 -1,000-character nomination on their website. Check out my stories to learn more details!! #SmileDirectPartner #worldsmileday #confidence #shareyourstory

A post shared by Brandi Cyrus (@brandicyrus) on Oct 4, 2019 at 10:13am PDT

Data-Driven Marketing

SmileDirectClub uses a marketing strategy heavily informed by data, from investment decisions in advertising to channel testing to crafting creative through its in-house agency. “We use a media mix model to help us think about our quarterly channel investment decisions as well as the multi-touch attribution system for daily and weekly optimizations,” Sheldon says. And recently, the brand has begun to build its own data models alongside the multi-touch attribution system in order to make decisions even more quickly. “Any MTA is going to require a certain seasoning window, but you don’t want to wait to the end of that season. So, we’re building models on top of the early reads that we’re getting through each of our different strategies we have in the marketplace, particularly with digital marketing,” he says.

Within a day or two after running a piece of digital marketing, the brand can start to make decisions based on what it knows will happen downstream rather than based on last click. “Particularly with our aligners, it’s a multi-step process. So, we need to build the ability to predict what that process is going to look like days and weeks out,” Sheldon says.

Data is a religion at the company. “We like to say that we fly the plane by the instruments and the instruments are the data,” Sheldon says. As an example, the brand discovered a new insight recently about the way people think about daily budgets. It learned the new information on a Thursday, immediately re-framed the brand’s smile transformation as costing less than $3 a day, had creative on Friday, did early testing over the weekend and scaled it up on Monday. Now that’s fast.

SmileDirectClub’s reliance on data and measurement has influenced its decisions about marketing investment. The brand has pulled back its out-of-home advertising spend due to the lack of measurement and has ramped up its investment in VOD and OTT instead. And while the brand has been increasing its spend in these platforms over the past 18 months, Sheldon believes it will continue industry-wide. “I think you’re seeing a shift. This ‘shelter-in-place’ moment that we’re experiencing is going to be a tipping point for a shift from linear TV to OTT and VOD platforms. TV is not going away, but you’re going to see an acceleration of the movement of money over to that OTT and VOD,” he says.

A Robust Marketing System

The brand’s relationship with customers is highly intimate. Once a customer makes the purchase—which could take up to a full year of consideration—the aligners will stay in their mouths for four to six months. Because of that intimacy, a robust marketing system buoyed by a CRM strategy is critical, Sheldon says. The brand relies on paid social—specifically Facebook and Instagram for reach—and TV advertising to educate the consumer, get them to visit the website and fill out the “smile assessment”—and then CRM does the heavy lifting. “It’s the heart of the system because there are so many places for our consumers to get lost along the way. When they have questions about insurance or, ‘does this work for my type of spacing or gap,’ all of that. We can use CRM to really pull them through the process,” Sheldon says.

Though the brand is still in the developing stages with it, it does use trigger-based direct mail to help consumers along the process as well. For instance, customers might not feel fully comfortable with the brand’s impression kits. “We provide them with a lot of resources to show just how easy it is,” Sheldon says. “We also remind them why they bought the impression kit in the first place.” The messages are often personalized for each prospect, thanks to information provided in the smile assessment. “It helps us understand what their motivations are. Someone might say, ‘I have a wedding coming up’ or a reunion. Or they’re concerned about spacing issues or crowding. In those worlds we customize many of our interactions with the customer, including with direct mail, based on what we learned in that overall smile assessment,” he says.

Next up for the brand? Global expansion. As of February 2020, SmileDirectClub operates in eight markets and is looking to add more. We’ll be watching.

The post Brands on Fire: SmileDirectClub appeared first on Chief Marketer.

In July, the Daily Beast published a list of all the brands MAGA supporters should boycott, including Walmart. Why? Because a third-party seller on the Walmart sells baby clothes with the slogan, “Impeach 45.” Meanwhile, GrabYourWallet.org has published a list of 45 companies to boycott for their support for Trump, along with a script and the contact details of company representatives to make it easier for consumers to voice their objections.

It’s fair to say that never have Americans expressed their politics through their pocketbooks as they do in recent times. It’s also fair to say that brands will find it increasingly difficult to stay clear of the fracas by advertising in non-biased channels.

But steering clear of highly-biased sites will be no easy feat. To begin, sites one would assume have nothing to do with politics may very well be extremely political, thanks to members who bring their views to the forum. Take Ravelry, a site that caters to people who like to knit and crochet. This summer its management team issued a statement saying it will no longer allow political comments.

Second, even if you maintain a blacklist of highly-biased sites to avoid, there’s no guarantee your ads won’t appear on them, especially if you rely on ad networks or purchase inventory via open ad exchanges. The industry hasn’t solved the transparency problem.

Third, social media channels, which are key for app developers’ UA campaigns, are fundamentally unsafe environments for brands. Recently, Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook wouldn’t even try to ban political ads that are patently false, stating in a Congressional hearing that if a candidate is lying, voters will want to know about those lies. Twitter said it would ban all political ads, but that’s no guarantee of brand safety if your ad appears next to a Tweet that calls for building the wall or jailing all billionaires. To my mind, it’s an open question as to whether app developers should advertise in social media next year.

What Can Brands Do?

Since no brand can afford to put all advertising on hold from now until the end of 2020, my recommendation is to accept this reality, and beef up your defenses. For instance:

• Update and scrub your whitelists and blacklists. Spend some time and effort identifying publications and channels whose audience aligns with yours and meets your brand safety requirements. Look beyond editorial content and examine readers’ comments. Do they bring up politics when it’s not germane to the article itself? Do they gang up on readers who have different views? If so, consider scratching it off your list.
• Update–and test–your keyword exclusion list. If you want to avoid the election altogether, you’ll need to review your keyword exclusion list regularly. Are they performing as anticipated? You may also want to consider excluding inherently political keywords like “impeachment,” or “caucus” or “superdelegate.”
• Demand radical transparency. If an ad network or partner can’t tell you exactly where your ads will be placed, scratch it off your media list. Granted this partner may have delivered great results for you in the past–or was just a pretty good way to spend down your media budget–but the stakes will be higher in 2020. The country is split 50/50, and if your ad appears on any side of the political divide, you can lose customers and prospects. Worse, overnight you may find your brand the target of a Twitter meme demanding a nationwide boycott.
• Establish internal content moderators. You can have signed contracts promising your media partners will honor your blacklists and whitelists, but you may also want to verify for it yourself. Consider hiring (or redeploying existing employees) content moderators to look for instances where your brand’s safety is jeopardized.
• Prepare now for potential problems. Despite your best efforts, you may be unfortunate enough to be the center of a political fray. Don’t wait until such an event occurs. If your goal is to steer clear of politics, and respect all opinions, state as much on your website. Explain the steps you take to ensure your ad dollars don’t go to hate sites or fund hateful content. It just may help some of the people who come to your site to understand that accidents happen.
• Stand your ground. Okay, it’s a politically charged phrase, but the truth is, some brands want to take a stand on politics and issues, even if that means losing some of their customers. That’s your right to do so. Just don’t cry foul if you end up with a lot of critical media attention. Take the time up front to understand the consequences of weighing before you weigh in.
• Amp up affinity partnerships. Second-party data exchanges–instances when two simpatico brands share customer lists in order to find net new audiences–may be an option worth exploring. This will allow you to advertise in extremely brand-safe environments.
• Look for alternatives to advertising. Finally, look for non-traditional advertising opportunities, like pre-loads for your app. In such cases, your app is pre-installed on phones, waiting for the user to discover it. It’s 100% transparent–you know where your is app is going and there’s no fraud to boot.

Anyone who reads the news knows as a country we are entering new territory. The 2020 election will be unlike any other in the nation’s history. Advertising won’t be exempt from turmoil, but with enough forethought and planning, your brand can weather the ride.

Matt Tubergen is Executive Vice President of Digital Turbine Media.

Other articles you might enjoy:

• ADT Brand Transformation Brings Evolution and Innovation
• Demanding Transparency: Six Ways to Combat Influencer Marketing Fraud
• Newsjacking Best Practices: Aviation Gin Hitches Ride on Peloton Controversy

The post Transparency and Safety: Eight Ways to Protect Your Brand From the Noise appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Created three years ago as a way to highlight the fast-growing agency community and to help marketers find the right partners for killer campaigns, the CM200 highlights agencies across the categories of experiential, sports and entertainment, promotion, retail, social media, B2B brand engagement, digital, design, B2B demand gen, B2B experiential and martech.

Chief Marketer editors fielded applications from around the country and chose winners based on insightful client testimonials; high caliber work; case study submissions; innovative and creative executions; and inspiring concepts that are propelling the industry forward.

The listing’s editorial profiles highlight the agencies’ core capabilities and specializations, examples of top-notch work, insights on company culture, consistent clients and RFP contact information. Those selected for this year’s program represent the crème de la crème of the marketing industry. Enjoy this year’s Chief Marketer 200.

The post Chief Marketer’s Top 200 Brand Engagement and Experience Agencies appeared first on Chief Marketer.

1. More mainstream brands will embrace the subscription model

We’ve all seen the articles detailing the financial fall of many brick-and-mortar stores. The “retailpocalypse” predicted years ago is coming to fruition as we’ve watched household names like Sears, Toys R Us and Barney’s consider bankruptcy or go up for sale. The shifting retail industry presents an opportunity for traditional companies to fully embrace recurring revenue models. We’ll see big brands like Nike and Ikea continue to experiment and expand innovative subscription offerings. For struggling brick-and-mortar businesses, subscription services could very well be a lifeline.

2. Niche products will give way to subscription fatigue

Because the proliferation of subscription offerings are so vast, specialized products and services will need to prove their worth. We’ve reached a point of max fragmentation in our subscriptions, so offerings must be far better than they’ve been in the past. Take media and entertainment. Exclusivity is the name of the game for streaming services from Apple and Disney as they go head to head with Netflix and Amazon. Deloitte found that the typical U.S. consumer subscribes to 3 streaming video services. With growing “subscription fatigue,” there isn’t room for more. Rising customer expectations and increased competition means we’ll see consolidation, partnerships and mergers in B2C (clothing, streaming, meal delivery) and B2B companies (project management, martech, ecommerce) alike in 2020.

Other articles you might enjoy:

• Customer Retention: The Next Frontier for Today’s CMO
• Five Ways to Get Obsessed With Customer Experience
• Upselling Can Help Stem Churn and Increase Retention: Study

3. Customer retention will become the new frontier for marketers

It’s impossible to ignore the IPO press around WeWork, Blue Apron, Uber, Peloton and others. If 2020’s tech and consumer unicorns have poor unit economics and aren’t turning a profit, they need to prepare to be the next ugly headline. The days of spouting fast, easy growth backed up by vanity metrics are over. And retention will take its place as a top growth strategy for companies with subscription models. Should that have been the case much sooner? Sure. But organizations like Zoom, Datadog and PagerDuty are the new standard for success. These companies each had successful IPOs in 2019 thanks in part to their killer retention metrics. More will follow suit.

4. Metrics will shift to reflect a retention-first mindset

To deliver on sustainable growth, changes must take place at an organizational level. The teams responsible for acquisition efforts will also be held to those acquired customers’ LTV more so than in years past. Of course, the acquisition-at-all-costs mentality isn’t a problem that originates solely within a marketing organization, but changing the focus of marketing teams to be retention-minded will be a common theme next year. This shift will also usher in a new partnership between marketers and product teams as they work together to onboard, activate and collect feedback from customers. A public and shared churn goal will help keep these teams aligned on their retention efforts.

5. Personalization will mean more than creepy ads and in an email

Personalization has been a big buzzword this past decade. But it’s time to go well beyond personalized variables delivered en masse. We need to look at interaction with our customers as a 1:1 event. That means taking more of the known factors of customers, segmenting them into groups and personalizing their web and product experiences to the point where it’s an entirely custom journey. This approach is going to be essential for success in the very near future. Salesforce Research found that customers are 2.1x more likely to view personalized offers as important vs. unimportant. And 84% say being treated like a person, not a number, is very important to winning their business. These numbers are only set to rise.

6. Customers will have even more control and companies must pay attention

Some companies are going to rise to the occasion of changing customer expectations. They’ll personalize more experiences and offer better support. But are they willing to make it easier to cancel? They may not have a choice. California enacted legislation on July 1, 2018, that stipulated subscriptions that were entered into online must able be available to cancel online. That means no customer support call queues. It’s a big win for consumers and we may see more legislation like it in other states. So, if you don’t have an easy online cancellation process, 2020 is your year to invest.

7. Multi-channel retention strategies will wow the customers; predictive engagement will not

Our 2019 State of Customer Retention Survey Report shows that both subscription business leaders are interested in developing predictive models to forecast customer churn. It’s understandable: predictive capabilities are a popular topic of discussion thanks to the increasing desire to leverage AI and machine learning. Let’s say you have a predictive model that shows you what accounts will churn. Not many leaders could confidently explain what happens then. When it comes to retention, most companies don’t have the systems in place to perform outreach at scale based on predictive data. In 2020, predictive models will remain a growth experiment that’s not quite ready for mainstream adoption.

Guy Marion is Founder and CEO of Brightback, a customer retention software for subscription businesses.

The post 7 Customer Retention Predictions for 2020 appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Crafting a more holistic marketing approach based on better sales and marketing integration is helping Hewlett Packard Enterprise improve account based marketing (ABM) and better engage key target accounts.

In 2014, Hewlett Packard split into two divisions, HP inc., the consumer business, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), the B2B arm of HP. Adam Benaroya, senior manager of global media at HPE, notes that at the start, the new organization felt like a “$50 billion start-up,” because at launch it was building its marketing structure from scratch alongside some legacy systems inherited from the shared infrastructure.

“We needed to rethink the B2B adtech and martech stack and [consider] what we needed, particularly around ABM,” says Benaroya.

Many of the sales and marketing teams in the new organization had account lists they wanted to activate with digital marketing techniques, but because of the size of the company there were decentralized strategies in place which were somewhat limiting.

‘We had too many lists from too many parts of the organization,” says Benaroya. “Sales alignment wasn’t always realized at the start of programs, list quality was questionable and any one account might sit in multiple programs at the same time.”

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Having access to customer data is critical for ABM success, no matter how large an enterprise your marketing team is managing.

“You can’t expect to find customers with a promising lifetime value and [create] an ideal customer profile without accurate data,” wrote Kristina James, director of marketing at MRD, in a recent article for Chief Marketer. “Putting in the time to research and evaluate data with a fine-tooth comb will also improve your demand gen campaigns. Suddenly, all of your outbound marketing will have the potential to be more personalized.”

The issue of siloed data, coupled with questionable list quality, added up to the true promise of ABM being near impossible for HPE to realize, notes Benaroya. “We needed to decide the best mix of campaigns and messaging to accounts but there was no holistic company strategy related to ABM.”

ABM success relies heavily not only on integration between various marketing channels, but on integration between all involved departments within an organization, marketing, operations and analytics teams, says Rene Asis, head of B2B measurement at LiveRamp, which works with HPE.

“The ABM journey has become more advanced,” he says. “The struggle is attaching channels to ROI signals, to see if your efforts are making a difference.”

A recent report from Ascend2 notes that while 65 percent of marketers see their ABM efforts as “somewhat successful,” only 29 percent describe their ABM initiatives as best-in-class. Not surprisingly, the highest percentage of respondents said that their primary objective with ABM was to increase existing account revenue (56 percent). But, not everyone is apparently succeeding in this goal: over a third (39 percent) also cited this as a top challenge for ABM success, topped only by increasing accounts and contacts and improving sales and marketing alignment (43 percent each).

HPE’s marketing team started to work closely with the sales teams, to help prioritize which accounts would be targeted with ABM strategies, in the process trimming down the number of individuals who would be involved in that decision making process.

The company has the luxury of a large data scientist team, notes Benaroya, which gives HPE access to propensity modeling to determine which accounts are currently in market. The goal was to manage the ABM process in a holistic way and create a clear strategy across both the entire portfolio of HP products and the target accounts.

“[Then], account centralization can be applied to the rest of our marketing work [in digital and beyond], whether it is events or any other type of analog marketing program going into market,” he says.

The more holistic marketing approach is helping HPE optimize media investments for new products, and prevent multiple siloed marketing efforts targeting a particular account at any time. The marketing team now had a list of account segments that matched back to the U.S. sales team roster which, when coupled with sales propensity models, would help target the messaging mix across different markets.

It can take time for companies to determine what success looks like for ABM, says James. “Traditional metrics, like the number of leads generated, for example, aren’t as important. KPIs change, and it’s hard to know upfront how many opportunities will be generated or how much pipeline is needed to fill the funnel.”

“In the past we had platforms that allowed us to activate” but these were siloed, says HP’s Benaroya, who spoke at Connect to Convert recently. “We wanted to measure full digital activity and  [increase our] measurement capability across all digital channels to see what activity was turning into leads.”

The Ascend2 survey of 293 marketing professionals found that in ABM more isn’t necessarily better. Forty-five percent of respondents said that managing fewer than 50 contacts was the most effective with ABM; 40 percent said they were working with 50 to 500 contacts, and only 15 percent said they worked effectively with over 500 contacts in their ABM program. Sales revenue, cited by 67 percent, was far and away the most effective metric used to measure ABM success, followed by qualified accounts (41 percent) and account engagement (38 percent). 

The post HP Improves ABM with Sales and Marketing Integration appeared first on Chief Marketer.